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Getting started with AlloyScan

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What is AlloyScan?

AlloyScan is a comprehensive cloud-native platform for network discovery and inventory. It detects, audits, and continually tracks every IT asset in your environment, including physical and virtual computers, laptops, servers, printers, switches, and other network devices also referred to as nodes. The collected audit data helps you reveal potential risks, find optimization opportunities, improve IT planning, and facilitate budgeting.

What data does AlloyScan collect?

  • Network scan: Discover and identify all active network devices

  • Peripherals: Collect information about installed peripherals, such as disk drives, video cards, printers and PCI devices

  • Hardware details: Obtain in-depth hardware information, CPU model, memory size, and other hardware-specific details

  • Software catalog: Keep track of all the software and applications installed across your organization

  • Virtual infrastructure: Collect information about your virtual infrastructure, including hypervisors, virtual machines, and their relationships

  • User details: Gather details about computer users, including user data from the Active Directory and information about existing user accounts and user groups

Main components

AlloyScan is comprised of the following main components:

  • Host: A deployed AlloyScan instance.

  • Audit Service: A lightweight program that audits devices and collects their inventory data remotely, without the need to deploy audit agents. Audit Service is installed on a Windows machine in your network.

  • Credentials: Audit credentials are required by Audit Service for auditing devices and collecting data. Most often, this is a combination of a user name and password. However, for auditing Linux and macOS computers or Citrix hypervisors, a private SSH key can be used instead. AlloyScan supports different types of audit credentials: Windows, Linux and macOS, Hypervisor and SNMP.

  • Audit Agent: A utility that you install on remote computers that should be audited. The term "remote computer" denotes a Windows machine which is outside your network and connected to the Internet.

Hardware and software requirements

To ensure that AlloyScan works efficiently, you need to install Audit Service and PowerShell on a Windows computer in your network.

Understanding the user interface

When logged in as a site administrator, you will be presented with the following user interface:

 

The main elements of the user interface are:

  • Navigation Pane: Provides quick access to all AlloyScan modules and their components.

  • Toolbar: Displays the currently selected module’s name and the current user’s name. It also includes the Search pane

Main workflow

Upon accessing your site for the first time, you will land on a dashboard with pre-configured widgets. Predictably, there is nothing to see in any of them... yet! This section describes how to start discovering devices on your network and auditing the required assets using AlloyScan.

The main steps that you are required to complete are:

  1. Create logical units in your infrastructure and provide credentials for accessing them. In AlloyScan these units are referred to as segments.

  2. Execute an automated network scan to discover servers, hypervisors, workstations, virtual machines, printers, and other IP-enabled devices.

  3. Specify which assets are to be audited, that is subjected to deeper analysis that retrieves hardware and software information.

  4. Create your IT inventory by grouping the audited devices based on multiple asset criteria.

  5. Manage the IT inventory by running ready-to-use reports and subscribing to smart notifications to stay alerted to important changes.

Creating segments

A segment is a logical unit of your infrastructure. A good example of a network segment is an Active Directory domain, a collection of computers and other network devices within a Microsoft Active Directory network. When you create a segment, you install an audit service that will run the audit within the segment, and specify the credentials the service will use to audit devices within the segment.

NOTE: The current version supports two types of segments: Domain and Address List. By creating a Domain segment you instruct AlloyScan to scan a specific network domain and display all the discovered assets. An Address List segment will include only the assets that you specify by providing a single IP address, IP range, subnet range, DNS name or NetBIOS name.

To create a segment:

  1. Do one of the following:

    1. In the dashboard, click the Start with a segment button in the Site health widget

    2. In the left navigation sidebar, choose Network. Then click the + sign next to Segments and choose Domain or Address List from the pop-up.

  2. Provide the Name of the new segment.

  3. Depending on the segment type, specify the audit scope:

    • In the Domain field, type in an existing domain name.

    • In the Address List field, specify single IP address, IP range, subnet range, DNS name or NetBIOS name.

  4. Keep the Use NetBIOS check box selected, just in case.

  5. In the Audit Service field, click the down arrow and then click Audit Service Tools to download the AlloyAuditService archive.

  6. Install AlloyAuditService on a Windows computer on your network. The host computer will then become available for selection in the Audit Service drop-down list.
  7. Under Credentials, provide credentials for auditing assets in the target domain or the assets specified in the Address List. Depending on the machine type and the operating system it runs, populate one of the following sections: Windows, Linux and macOS, Hypervisor, or SNMP.

  8. Click OK. Your first segment is ready for discovery and audit.

Running the initial scan

To scan the current segment, click Scan on top of the segment details page. AlloyScan will start automatically populating the audit information about discovered computers and network devices. Upon completion, a summary of the scan statistics will appear. For an initial scan, the statistics will only include the total number of discovered nodes. The statistics for each subsequent scan will be more granular and enriched with the previous data.

Building the inventory

Following a scan, you can decide for which discovered devices you would like to retrieve in-depth information about installed hardware and software, system data, security information, event log records, etc. The process of collecting such data is called audit. The devices selected for auditing are automatically added to the inventory.

The AlloyScan inventory has pre-configured groups that allow you to organize the assets for your convenience. The structure is easily customizable: you can create sub-groups in the existing groups or add new groups to the pre-configured list.

As soon as a device is added to the inventory, you can schedule regular audits for the device itself, the sub-group or group it belongs to, or for the entire segment.

Executing reports

AlloyScan is shipped with a predefined set of reports representing various kinds of information from the database in a convenient form. You can customize the predefined reports or create your own by applying a wide spectrum of parameters, making sure that they exactly match your requirements. Reports can be generated in various output formats and saved to a local or network computer or sent via e-mail.

Setting up notifications

AlloyScan sends out notifications to alert users when certain hardware or software conditions are detected. AlloyScan comes with a set of canned notifications, whose conditions, as well as the notification text, can be customized by your AlloyScan administrator.

Notifications are delivered to the web browser (notification area) and (or) via email.

To subscribe to notifications, click your name at the upper-right corner, select Manage Your Account, and go to Notifications.